


Have You Met His Highness?

by daphnerunning



Category: Tales of Vesperia
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 10:36:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnerunning/pseuds/daphnerunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Flynn knows more than he's supposed to. Fortunately, he knows how to keep his mouth shut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Have You Met His Highness?

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a headcanon of mine and pengiesama. Blatantly and unrepentantly ignores First Strike canon.

“Ah, Flynn--have you met His Highness Ioder?”

There’s a faint hint of confusion in familiar blue eyes. Ioder hasn’t known, and doesn’t know now.

Flynn realizes it almost immediately, but he says nothing.

Part of being a good knight is knowing when to keep his mouth shut. He keeps it shut when he shakes Ioder’s hand, when the boy introduces himself firmly for all his youth.

It’s easy to pretend he doesn’t know. No one else does, probably. After all, there’s no reason he _should_ know anything. There’s no reason a Captain in the Imperial Knights should know who Ioder’s father was, since most of the citizens of Zaphias don’t. An educated populace, many of the noble-born Knights have told them, is an _entitled_ populace, and they can’t have that.

There’s no reason a common-born servant’s whelp like Flynn should know much about a mild scandal that made ripples in society a decade and a half earlier, when a brash, competent Knight had made good by charming his way into a noblewoman’s marital bed. 

There’s no reason, except that Flynn’s mother had drank herself sick on wine at the announcement of the marriage, had showed him a tiny portrait of the man and whispered words a common-born servant’s whelp wasn’t supposed to know, because his mother isn’t good at keeping her mouth shut. That was why she’d been dismissed from service at the Palace, and why she and her son that wasn’t supposed to exist had been driven to the Lower Quarter. That had been just days before she’d taken a wrong step and slipped, landing on her head in a snow drift that nobody had bothered to clean up because it was just the Lower Quarter. No one had found her until morning.

He’d never even told Yuri, the other half of his childhood. It doesn’t affect him, after all. Part of getting ahead in Zaphias is knowing when to speak, and when to shut his mouth. Flynn is going to get out of the Lower Quarter if it kills him, and if it means never, _ever_ mentioning the man who had made his mother cry, that’s a small price to pay.

The first time he’s referred to as “common-born” in the Knights, he says nothing. His father had been anything but common, but that’s not the point, because his mother had been a serving girl, fifteen and willing to do anything for a man who gave her flowers and coins and smiles. 

Yuri had never cared about who his parents are. Then again, Yuri’s mother had left him at the room in the Inn when her dance troupe had left the next day, when he was barely out of swaddling clothes.

Flynn, at least had been all of five. He’d known what he wanted, and how to get it. 

He had already known how to keep his mouth shut, and why opening it could land him in a snowdrift. He opens his mouth when he has to, and when it will get him somewhere in life--which is why he’s _going_ somewhere in life, and Yuri’s still in the Lower Quarter.

So when Ioder looks up at him with his own eyes, their father’s eyes, Flynn says nothing. He knows better than to be part of the “educated” populace. He talks about Yuri, and the Lower Quarter, and the Knights--nothing off-limits. Nothing that will make Ioder feel twitchy about his new appointment. 

It’s too bad, because Ioder seems like a good kid, a good little brother, and he’ll probably be a good Emperor. It would be nice to have a family, and Flynn can see that Ioder is just as lonely as he is, most days. 

If Ioder suspects, he never says anything. Flynn hopes he just doesn’t know, because he’s starting to have headaches from keeping his jaw clenched so tightly shut. 


End file.
